Once upon a time

Noel Vera

Once upon a time, back when the world was simpler and animation
almost something you do in a garage or with a few friends or even
practically by yourself, Disney produced real animated art. After
the success of his eight-minute short "Steamboat Willie" (1928), the
first ever to use synchronized sound and music, Disney came up with
the idea of a series of unconnected shorts that would make as
extensive use of music as they would of animation.

The first of the series, "The Skeleton Dance" (1929), about a gang
of skeletons that climb out of their graves to indulge in serious
partying to the tune of Edvard Grieg's "Dance of the Gnomes," is
(thanks to master animator Ub Iwerks) a brilliant exploration of the
many possible connections (not just, as the song goes, to the hip
bone) or uses that can be improvised out of a bone. Various skulls,
thighbones, ribs are used as drums, horns, xylophones; the onset of
sunrise causes the skeletons to form a fantastical many-headed, many-
legged creature that gallops for the safety of the tomb. More
interesting than the inventiveness is the emotional tone of the
piece, a macabre sense of playfulness that you rarely find in later
Disney shorts (Chuck Jones, who worked at Iwerk's studio when he was
young, declared "Iwerks is screwy spelled backwards"). An early
masterpiece, and easily one of the best of the series.

"The Ugly Duckling" (1931) and its colored remake in 1939, a take on
the famous fairy tale about the odd fowl that grew to be a beautiful
swan, are an interesting study in contrast. Leonard Maltin, who
compares the two shorts, notes how the performance of the latter
animals is so much subtler. I give him the increased sophistication
of the techniques (Disney, among other things, was often a thankless
taskmaster), but this didn't necessarily mean it was an altogether
good thing--something happened, not necessarily with the advent of
color. One problem was the departure of Iwerks (he was responsible
not only for the brilliant animation in "Skeleton Dance," but also
in "Steamboat Willie"). Another was this cloying, simpering quality
that appeared more and more in the characters, and insisted on
tugging at your heartstrings. The second "Duckling" wanted to move
you, to make you cry, where the earlier one had this bracing sense
of amorality behind the ostensible moral lesson, as if its real
interest is in cramming as many jokes into its compact few minutes
as possible.

"Flowers and Trees" (1932) was Disney's first animated short in
color, and shows Disney's skill in extending a metaphor (trees
having a night out, with leafy boughs for feathered boas, and a glow-
worm for an engagement ring). "The Three Little Pigs" (1933) was the
biggest boxoffice hit of the series, and its song "Who's Afraid of
the Big Bad Wolf" hit a public nerve--to the viewers the wolf was
the Great Depression (running rampant at the time), and the song was
an expression of brave defiance. The short wasn't so much an example
of inventiveness as it was of strong characterization and of simple,
coherent storytelling, as were "The Grasshopper and the Ants," "The
Wise Little Hen" (featuring the debut of Donald Duck), "The Big Bad
Wolf" (all 1934, the latter being a sequel to the popular "Three
Little Pigs," with a guest appearance by Red Riding Hood), and "The
Tortoise and the Hare" (1935). Perhaps the best of the shorts during
this period was "The Flying Mouse" (also 1934), not from any
recognizable fairy tale, about a mouse that wished himself a pair of
wings, and found he didn't belong in either the world of mice or the
world of bats--here, the darker qualities, including a particularly
effective nightmare sequence (at least, it had the quality of being
nightmarish) helped offset the sugary Disney sentimentality.

(Silly Symphonies shorts are easily available on DVD)

(First published in High Life Magazine, April 2005)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)

Two minor Disney gems: "The Old Mill" and "The Cookie Carnival"

Disney reportedly made "The Old Mill" as a sort of dress rehearsal
for the effects and animation techniques he would use for his first
animated feature film, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" (either
the second--or third, depending on who you believe--animated feature
ever made). Definitely not your typical animated short, what with
the opening image of a cobweb glittering in the morning sunrise, and
the camera moving through it towards the mill standing far off;
later we enter the mill, a dark but not forbidding tower, filled
with creatures that have made the structure their home. The images
have a remarkable sense of depth; Disney was experimenting with the
multiplane camera, a camera that shoots through several sheets of
glass, an animated figure or object laid on each different layer, to
achieve a three-dimensional quality (invented, incidentally, by
Disney's most brilliant animator at the time, Ub Iwerks); you can
see the camera probing into windows, ducking under wooden beams,
rising past giant cogs and birds' nests to the bats hanging high
above. There are other techniques that would later be used in "Snow
White"--lightning, wind and rain effects--and anthropomorphized
animals much like the ones that would befriend the heroine through
her adventures.

"The Old Mill" does, this many years later, seem to be something
considerably more than a mere practice run for "Snow White:" like
Disney's best works, the short relies not so much on dialogue as on
a powerful combination of image and music to cast its spell. Many
have described it as a kind of wordless poem, which isn't a bad
description--like a poem, it evokes more than it shows; like a poem
it has a spare elegance, with little time to waste on Disney's usual
bows to sentimentality and traditional values (something you can't
say about many of his features).

But if "The Old Mill" is technically the best, most admired, most
serious effort among Disney's Silly Symphonies, it's strange to
confess that Disney's wonderfully unserious "The Cookie Carnival" is
easily my favorite. Hard to say why--I do like pastries, and any
form of art that makes imaginative use of food. But part of it may
also be because it's crammed full of inventive little jokes, and
follows the format of the classic fairy tale without wasting too
much time and effort on the kind of bathos that usually comes with
Disney's style of storytelling.

So: the Cookie Carnival starts, and we have a parade of various
confections--Miss Coconut is an Eskimo girl posing in a float made
of shredded coconut snow; Miss Peppermint is decked out in patriotic
reds, whites and blues; Miss Licorice is a dancing African princess;
and we just missed Miss Strawberry Blonde's float pass by. The band
includes a big drum filled with candy that spills with every beat
and soldiers armed with peppermint stick rifles and lollipop lances;
an éclair canoe scoots through the crowd while an eggbeater unicycle
skitters by and a bike with pretzel wheels lurches along.

The story premise is quickly, effortlessly set up: a cookie hobo
walking down a pair of peppermint rails finds a cookie girl crying,
asks her what's wrong; she says she wants to join the carnival but
has nothing to wear. The hobo improvises a gown out of cupcake paper
decorated with judiciously squirted icing, rouges her cheeks with
marshmallow poofs, and applies tiny candy hearts for lipstick.

When the judges see her--wrapped up in cellophane like a mannequin
on display--they are dazzled; a jelly roll unfurls into a rich red
carpet to welcome her, while lollipops as gels shoot out colorful
spotlight beams. The carnival queen is asked to choose her king, and
again we have a parade of wonderfully imagined characters--geeky
angel-food cake boys, hotfooted devil's food cake boys, inebriated
rum cookie boys. The queen's ultimate choice is probably as
inevitable as sunrise, but the amount of sheer delight this gem of a
short gives us along the way more than makes up for the
predictability. Easily one of the loveliest six minutes of animation
I've ever seen.

7/22/04